It has long been known to equip a motor vehicle with sun visors to shade the eyes of the driver and front seat passenger from the glare of the sun coming through the windshield or side window of a motor vehicle. Many motor vehicles include sun visors that are pivotally mounted on individual stalks and manually pivoted on the stalks between a stowed position adjacent the motor vehicle headliner and one or more operating positions covering an upper portion of the windshield or side window.
Unfortunately, such sun visors have a limited range of motion and so provide glare protection over only a limited range of visor positions. In particular, most prior art sun visor designs provide little protection against glare entering through two intrusion areas: 1) the area between the visor edge and the rear view mirror outboard edge; and 2) when the sun visor is rotated 90 degrees to block glare entering through the vehicle side window, the area between the visor edge and the B-pillar trim.
Prior art solutions include additional parts or assemblies added to the sun visor which can be deployed by extending, unfolding, rotating out, etc. to provide glare protection in the above-described intrusion areas. Other solutions require clip on shades or other protectors requiring similar deployment actions. Such solutions, while potentially effective for their intended purposes, add cost and complexity to the manufacturing process. In turn, such add-on features are subject to breakage since manufacturers typically attempt to provide sun visors and add-ons that are as thin as possible to avoid the appearance of bulky parts. Thus, a need is identified in the art for improvements to prior art sun visor designs intended to provide an extended range of glare protection, particularly at hard-to-reach intrusion areas as described above.
To solve this and other problems, the present disclosure describes an extended-range sun visor track system providing an extended range of protection from glare.